Hello there. I was browsing your challenges and read a post that I had to reply too and here I am. I just wanted to post this link in it's own thread because there seems to be quite a few novices out there that don't know where to really start.

The CS50 (computer Science) course at Harvard is free to the public, in video and can be streamed to your ipod, iphone etc.

If you don't have a bunch of certs and are not already a CIS, don't just blow these video courses off. I am a CIS and I've used these courses personally to refresh since they've become available online.

Greetings and salutations everyone. I'd had access to this for some time and when they made it completely public people blogged about it for some time. Then it kinda died down but like I said. If you don't have a current MCSE,MSCA and are not already a CIS, these courses will help you learn what you need to know to move forward.

BTW, the HARVARD courses online are FREE.. Please don't go there trying to change the page, inject it or hack it in any way. This site isn't public for a reason and if it gets out that this domain has targeted them in any way, we will loose it.

There several classes from Harvard on i-tunes which are free to download. These may be even more interesting to those here. Computer science e1 understanding computers, building dynamic websites (PHP) and one on Java and XML. They are full length lectures of pretty much the entire course. Just go to i-tunes and search the podcast directory for "Harvard" or for "Harvard extension school". There are several classes that I think were put there for distance education or something, anyway I got some good information out of it, and they are completely free and available for anyone to download. Even if you already know the languages, it's worth at least looking into.

Some of you may already be aware of these but lecturefox has created a list of free comptuer science lectures (video and audio) from many different place, on many different topics. Hope it helps someone. It can be found here: http://lecturefox.com/computerscience/